Field of the Invention
The subject matter disclosed herein generally relates to sensors deployed at machines (e.g., industrial machines) and, more specifically, to the names associated with these sensors.
Brief Description of the Related Art
Various types of industrial machines are used to perform various manufacturing operations and tasks. Other machines can be used for other tasks, e.g., power generation. For instance, some machines are used to create and finish parts associated with wind turbines. Other machines are used to create mechanical parts or components utilized by vehicles. Still other machines are used to produce electrical parts (e.g., resistors, capacitors, and inductors to mention a few examples). Typically, industrial machines are controlled at least in part by computer code (or a computer program) that is executed by a processor located at the machine.
The industrial machines typically have sensors (or “tags”) associated with them. The sensors typically measure various physical qualities such as temperature and pressure. The measured values may relate to the operation of the machine or characteristics of the product/process created by the machine.
Analytic programs (“analytics”) take the information from the sensors and utilize this information in various ways. For example, analytics may determine how efficiently a machine is operating or the state of the machine. Analytics need to identify the tags having the information they will utilize in order to perform their analysis. To accomplish this purpose, the tags on the machines are assigned names and this is typically done by a human user. Once named, the tag names on the machine can be mapped to tag names used by the analytics. Thus, needed information can be passed from a given tag on a machine to a particular analytic and utilized.
Current approaches rely upon the manual mapping of tag names (of customer machines) to tag names (used by analytics). Unfortunately, in modern industrial settings, there can be thousands (or tens of thousands) of tag names making the mapping process time-consuming, costly, and prone to human error. Additionally, different users may also name tags according to different naming conventions adding to the amount of time for performing the mapping process. All of these problems have led to user dissatisfaction with current approaches.